The stage resembles the Tomorrow's World studio circa 1980: you imagine Judith Hann appearing to introduce pop music of the future. Instead of glowing laptop screens, there are exotically boxy synthesizers, sprouting thick tangles of wires. As Ladytron's Mira Aroyo teases screeches and skronks out of her machines, she looks like one of Doctor Who's assistants behind the control panel of the Tardis.

When the Liverpool-based band released their first single six years ago, their enthusiasm for vintage synthesizers and Cold War ambience seemed thrillingly eccentric. Even if the early 1980s have been thoroughly ransacked, Ladytron remain uniquely interested in creating machine-made pop music that's grimy, intimidating and visceral. By incorporating more conventional instruments into their forthcoming third album, Witching Hour, they've become an unprecedented amalgam of Orbital and a garage rock band.

Their stage presence is bracingly unfriendly. At the back are four poker-faced men in black, so interchangeable you suspect they were manufactured en masse in Minsk. Helen Marnie looks like Chloe Sevigny in a Louise Brooks wig and is the only member permitted to smile. She sings cyanide-laced pop songs such as Playgirl, which contains the archetypal Ladytron lyric: "Why are you dancing when you could be alone?" Bulgarian Mira Aroyo has a stare that could burn through concrete and sings like she's barking stern yet inexplicable commands across a factory floor.

In the ICA's austere environs, Ladytron seem torn between being a twisted pop band and a 21st-century Throbbing Gristle. Perhaps the latter isn't intentional. More than once, misbehaving electronics and bad sound levels conspire to create levels of shrieking noise so painful the FBI could use them to end sieges. When the mists clear, though, they are monumentally good; new song Destroy Everything You Touch is ominous yet uplifting, like a Soviet Girls Aloud, or Nico performing at a rave. The future may yet be theirs.